[114/365] It's All Drag
Apr. 24th, 2021 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI wrote my first submission for a zine and then the deadline was the end of February 2020 so, uh, it never happened.
But I like what I wrote -- I'm glad I did it, as it could only have been written in a short time period, not long before or after this -- and I've found myself wanting to reference it since, so I thought I'd just put it here.
___
I am talking to a friend about what I could wear to a wedding I'd been invited to. My friend, who welcomes all pronouns but he/him, says, “It's all drag, isn't it.” It's a statement, not a question.
I'm agender. Everyone I meet perceives me as having a gender, but it's all drag.
“I'll go in abled drag,” I tell another friend as I fold up my white cane and make my disability invisible. He's disabled too, both visibly and invisibly, so he nods in understanding.
I'm partially sighted, so I have a lot of practice at this kind of drag. I was born blind but I didn't have the white cane until my mid-30s. Everything about my upbringing told me that my only option was “look normal, behave as if you see normally.” You're partially sighted, so you can pass for sighted!
My parents expect me to be normal in other ways too, ones they don't even have words for. They don't know that they want me to be heterosexual or monogamous or cis, but they do want that. I don't know if they'd say “but if you're bi you can act straight,” “you're married so you must be monogamous,” “you've always been a woman and everyone has to have a gender”... But then they never had to actually say “you're partially sighted so you can pretend to see normally.” I'm very good at all the normal they want, and with luck they'll never know that it's all drag. “Drag” is another word they don't know.
Unfolding my white cane is drag too, though, just as much as folding it up is. Sometimes, it's safest not to interrupt people while they're making the mistake that blindness is a binary. So then I have to pretend to see less than I can.
Sometimes people, thinking themselves unobserved, act around my white cane in a way that I can only assume they'd like to act all the time: People try to sneak in front of me in queues. Men stare at my tits even more blatantly than usual (when I try to tell sighted people with similar chest landscapes about this, they refuse to believe it's possible for the ogling to get even worse than they're used to, but I can compare this to what I experience in abled drag and I swear it really is worse). It's as I'm some kind of wizard and the white cane is a staff that magically shows me see people's true souls rather than the superficial appearance they present to the world -- their upstanding-member-of-society drag, maybe. This is an unasked-for and a daunting magic.
When I'm out in public, sometimes I play a game in my head: I try to determine which of a stranger's reactions to me are because of the increasingly-ambiguous gender indicators I am presenting them with these days, and which are because of the varying disability indicators I present them with. Is the woman who started to let me on the bus before her, then looked at me and took a big obvious step ahead of me just letting a ladies-first mentality override her initial impulse to let the disabled guy get on the bus first? Or did she see me reacting to her silent movement and decide I wasn't blind enough for the perk of going ahead? When women in public toilets look at me in alarm or mutter to their friends about me being in the wrong place, have they decided that I'm a devious man? Or that I've blundered into the wrong bathroom because a blind person can't be expected to get it right? Sometimes those are apparently the only two explanations for my presence: I can only be malicious or pitiable.
You might say such people are perhaps blind to reality, but I wouldn't. I don't like metaphorical uses of blindness, like “blinded by love” or “blind to the consequences.” They all use blindness to mean ignorance or apathy. Just as, conversely, we use sight to mean knowledge and understanding: do you see what I mean? A horrible writer for a horrible UK tabloid once wrote of a blind trans woman: “being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex?” Sighted people's understanding of blindness can be so profoundly disabling to them that they can doubt blind people’s ability to possess personal knowledge and understanding even of our own bodies.
I used to hear “I forget you can't see very well!” fairly often, from friends and partners. I took it as a compliment. Normal-drag is hard work, and I was glad to have my efforts acknowledged. I also saw it as a vote of confidence that the normal-drag was still keeping me safe. Now I would think differently, but now people don't seem to say this to me much. Has my white cane, however irregularly I'm using it, made it harder for people to forget or have I just let disability permeate my entire identity?
Speaking of forgetting: lately I've been dispirited at clearly still ending up on a lot of friends' mental lists of women, and not on their mental lists of trans people. Wondering how I could help stop them forgetting, I briefly considered insisting on they/them pronouns. I tried to convince myself I could muster up an emotional connection to the markers of non-binary identity that my friend circles already know and expect. But truthfully, I don't even label myself non-binary (though I don't mind others using it for me), I feel no differently about they/them than any other pronouns and I hated the mere thought of telling my friends otherwise. So this would be drag too, of a kind particularly corrosive to my soul, and I quickly abandoned the idea once I realized that.
Instead, still not wanting to abandon the name everyone knows me by, I've added a new one. Maybe that'll be the equivalent reminder to my white cane. For once...it doesn't feel like drag? It's actually me. So it's the name I'll sign with here.
--Erik
But I like what I wrote -- I'm glad I did it, as it could only have been written in a short time period, not long before or after this -- and I've found myself wanting to reference it since, so I thought I'd just put it here.
___
I am talking to a friend about what I could wear to a wedding I'd been invited to. My friend, who welcomes all pronouns but he/him, says, “It's all drag, isn't it.” It's a statement, not a question.
I'm agender. Everyone I meet perceives me as having a gender, but it's all drag.
“I'll go in abled drag,” I tell another friend as I fold up my white cane and make my disability invisible. He's disabled too, both visibly and invisibly, so he nods in understanding.
I'm partially sighted, so I have a lot of practice at this kind of drag. I was born blind but I didn't have the white cane until my mid-30s. Everything about my upbringing told me that my only option was “look normal, behave as if you see normally.” You're partially sighted, so you can pass for sighted!
My parents expect me to be normal in other ways too, ones they don't even have words for. They don't know that they want me to be heterosexual or monogamous or cis, but they do want that. I don't know if they'd say “but if you're bi you can act straight,” “you're married so you must be monogamous,” “you've always been a woman and everyone has to have a gender”... But then they never had to actually say “you're partially sighted so you can pretend to see normally.” I'm very good at all the normal they want, and with luck they'll never know that it's all drag. “Drag” is another word they don't know.
Unfolding my white cane is drag too, though, just as much as folding it up is. Sometimes, it's safest not to interrupt people while they're making the mistake that blindness is a binary. So then I have to pretend to see less than I can.
Sometimes people, thinking themselves unobserved, act around my white cane in a way that I can only assume they'd like to act all the time: People try to sneak in front of me in queues. Men stare at my tits even more blatantly than usual (when I try to tell sighted people with similar chest landscapes about this, they refuse to believe it's possible for the ogling to get even worse than they're used to, but I can compare this to what I experience in abled drag and I swear it really is worse). It's as I'm some kind of wizard and the white cane is a staff that magically shows me see people's true souls rather than the superficial appearance they present to the world -- their upstanding-member-of-society drag, maybe. This is an unasked-for and a daunting magic.
When I'm out in public, sometimes I play a game in my head: I try to determine which of a stranger's reactions to me are because of the increasingly-ambiguous gender indicators I am presenting them with these days, and which are because of the varying disability indicators I present them with. Is the woman who started to let me on the bus before her, then looked at me and took a big obvious step ahead of me just letting a ladies-first mentality override her initial impulse to let the disabled guy get on the bus first? Or did she see me reacting to her silent movement and decide I wasn't blind enough for the perk of going ahead? When women in public toilets look at me in alarm or mutter to their friends about me being in the wrong place, have they decided that I'm a devious man? Or that I've blundered into the wrong bathroom because a blind person can't be expected to get it right? Sometimes those are apparently the only two explanations for my presence: I can only be malicious or pitiable.
You might say such people are perhaps blind to reality, but I wouldn't. I don't like metaphorical uses of blindness, like “blinded by love” or “blind to the consequences.” They all use blindness to mean ignorance or apathy. Just as, conversely, we use sight to mean knowledge and understanding: do you see what I mean? A horrible writer for a horrible UK tabloid once wrote of a blind trans woman: “being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex?” Sighted people's understanding of blindness can be so profoundly disabling to them that they can doubt blind people’s ability to possess personal knowledge and understanding even of our own bodies.
I used to hear “I forget you can't see very well!” fairly often, from friends and partners. I took it as a compliment. Normal-drag is hard work, and I was glad to have my efforts acknowledged. I also saw it as a vote of confidence that the normal-drag was still keeping me safe. Now I would think differently, but now people don't seem to say this to me much. Has my white cane, however irregularly I'm using it, made it harder for people to forget or have I just let disability permeate my entire identity?
Speaking of forgetting: lately I've been dispirited at clearly still ending up on a lot of friends' mental lists of women, and not on their mental lists of trans people. Wondering how I could help stop them forgetting, I briefly considered insisting on they/them pronouns. I tried to convince myself I could muster up an emotional connection to the markers of non-binary identity that my friend circles already know and expect. But truthfully, I don't even label myself non-binary (though I don't mind others using it for me), I feel no differently about they/them than any other pronouns and I hated the mere thought of telling my friends otherwise. So this would be drag too, of a kind particularly corrosive to my soul, and I quickly abandoned the idea once I realized that.
Instead, still not wanting to abandon the name everyone knows me by, I've added a new one. Maybe that'll be the equivalent reminder to my white cane. For once...it doesn't feel like drag? It's actually me. So it's the name I'll sign with here.
--Erik
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-24 09:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-24 11:57 pm (UTC)Fuck people who dismiss your lived and comparative experiences of stuff. Performativity of impairment/disability is tiring.
I've shared this post with a VI friend and some other queerish disaleds who all I think will enjoy it either in general Cos You Write Well or for relatability reasons.
Also can the pandemic hurry up so we can hang out over TEA soon? I have so many thoughts that would be chitchat tea blether and aren't amenable to brain typing on the keyboard into pixels.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-27 09:06 am (UTC)Aw, thank you, it's always great to get my words in front of people. I hope they like it. :)
Also can the pandemic hurry up so we can hang out over TEA soon?
I know right! It will be so good to see you once that's safe again. I've moved but I'm still in a reasonable location for family-escaping if you want that, and with a nicer spare room you can stay in. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-25 09:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-27 09:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-27 09:25 am (UTC):)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-26 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-27 09:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-26 04:46 pm (UTC).... Yeah, don't tell me who that is because I will punch them through the internet.
But truthfully, I don't even label myself non-binary (though I don't mind others using it for me), I feel no differently about they/them than any other pronouns
God, thiiiiis. Saying non-binary, to me, acknowledges a binary simply because you can't be "not something" if that something doesn't exist. My gender has absolutely no relationship to the binary. I deeply uncomfortable calling myself non-binary because of that, though (like you) I don't care if other people use that label for me.
This is also part of the reason I don't call myself trans, by the by. In my head, to be transgender, you have to acknowledge that gender exists and you have a relationship to it, even if that relationship is "my gender doesn't fit this societal concept". Yes, I am technically trans because trans is often interpreted by people to mean "not cisgender". But to call myself trans feels like a lie because, again, I don't have a relationship to gender at all. It's kind of like me trying to imagine what it would be like to be a frog or beluga. It's such an alien concept that I can't understand it at all.
I know that this is just nitpicking. That's why I kind of shrug and go "meh, whatever" when people call me non-binary or trans. It's convenient and it's technically correct. If I don't have the energy to go into deep conversation about what it is to be agender, calling me non-binary or trans is good enough.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-04-27 09:39 am (UTC)He needs punching. :) He's famous/notorious here, but you probably don't know his name, which is a small mercy for you.
Saying non-binary, to me, acknowledges a binary
In my most snarky moods, I say that I'm outside the binary/non-binary binary. :)
I do believe that gender exists in that it's clearly important to a lot of people I know who have done the gender introspection whether they come out of that cis or trans (or something else), but it's not something I have any experience with.
But to call myself trans feels like a lie because, again, I don't have a relationship to gender at all.
I can understand that, even though I do call myself trans because I understand it as "my gender is not what I was assigned at birth" and while I think the problem there is assigning babies a gender, and not my particular one. Ideally I wouldn't have a relationship with gender except what I internally felt or deliberately chose, but that isn't the world I feel like I live in, because gender isn't only assigned at birth, it's ascribed instantaneously and subconsciously by every stranger I interact with. It has helped to be able to distinguish my gender identity ("no") from my desired gender presentation (which turns out to be pretty specific).
Calling myself trans feels like a lie to me more because I don't have a visceral negative reaction to my given name or pronouns. I don't expect to be subject to hate crimes. The medical gatekeeping I can anticipate (which is fierce in the UK) is no different from what I'm used to as a USian, as a poor person, as a disabled person, as an immigrant. I don't want to take away from the near-universal suffering of trans people but also I'm sad that our society has ensured that suffering is a shared characteristic of almost all trans people.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-03-26 12:07 am (UTC)This is yet another excellent essay. Thanks, Erik!